Long digital television (DTV) channel acquisition time yields a poor customer experience due to a significant delay when changing channels. Channel switch time delay may be caused by several factors such as radio frequency (RF) tuner frequency change, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) lock, symbol lock, packet identification (PID) decoding and program acquisition, intra-coding frame (I-frame) delay, video frame buffer build, and program selection lag. In some cases, a DTV device may experience over a one second delay when switching digital channels. During such delay, a blank or frozen screen is presented on the DTV device.